Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism

Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism

Wolff, Tristram

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1503632768
ISBN13: 9781503632769
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Oct 11 2022
Pages: 338
Weight: 1.37
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

In this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together.

Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the uprooted word, or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its gray romanticism simultaneously gives language different kinds of time--most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form--to forestall the hardening of time into progress.

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